


love comes in (love comes out)

by obstinatrix



Category: Elton John (Musician), The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Angst, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Paul Fails To Communicate Again, Photographs, Post-1980
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 07:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30119286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinatrix/pseuds/obstinatrix
Summary: Elton remembered, vividly, the last time he'd seen John and Paul together, an unassailable little bubble of two in the corner of Elton's New York hotel room. Paul had been off his face then, too, but not like this."I've spoken to Yoko," Paul admitted, after a minute. "Now I've come to speak to you.""What about?" Elton said politely, pretending not to know.Or: in 1981 or thereabouts, Paul and Elton almost talk hard truths about John Lennon, but not quite.
Relationships: John Lennon & Elton John, John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney & Elton John
Comments: 20
Kudos: 65





	love comes in (love comes out)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wishwellingtons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/gifts).



> The inspiration for this fic was a comment Elton made about how he thinks he never got AIDS because he was never that interested in having sex himself, so much as he was interested in getting other people to do it and then taking pictures. Other inspirations include the fact that Paul went around asking practically anyone who ever knew John whether they thought John had still loved him, after he'd been shot. 
> 
> Elton is living here in a nebulous apartment in a nebulous place in a nebulous country, because the extent of my research here was googling "where did Elton John live in 1981" and the internet did not immediately know, so. Instant gratification or gtfo.
> 
> Title from Paul's "Waterspout," which is an absolute banger and which John would've made him release properly.
> 
> I am gifting this to wishwellingtons because I adore her and this is somehow her fault even though she hates unfixable things.

It was a few moments before Elton realised that the pounding he could hear was not, in fact, coming from inside his head. Someone was knocking on the door. This was, in itself, unusual: anyone attempting to pound so rudely on Elton's door would first have to bludgeon his or her way past the building doorman and the lift-operator, and anyway, Elton wasn't expecting visitors. For a moment he actually considered whether it might be the police, and conducted an anxious mental inventory of what was in his bedroom and how much of it he could flush down the loo before the intruder broke the door down. 

"Oy!" shouted the pounder. "Spangles!" 

This was new. Not police, then, and something about the voice was familiar. A shiver crawled down Elton's spine. "Who is it?" he demanded, more timorously than he'd intended. 

"Open the fuckin' door and find out," said the voice, and this time -- God -- 

He opened the door. The shock of seeing Paul McCartney standing uninvited in the hallway was actually almost greater, Elton thought, than if it  _ had  _ been John after all, come back from the dead for a fight. Their voices always had blurred together somewhat, when he'd lain on his narrow little single bed and daydreamed to  _ Love Me Do;  _ and also adding to the Lennonesque timbre was the fact that Paul was drunk. Elton clocked that straight away. Took one to know one. 

"Goodness me," Elton said. 

Paul took this as an invitation to enter. Elton wondered when he'd last been refused entry to anywhere -- hell, anything; anyone. Paul's face opened doors now without even asking. 

Still, Elton had to admit it was a hell of a face, even wearing its current expression. The fine lines at the corners of Paul's eyes had deepened, of late, and there was more silver in his hair than Elton remembered. He looked too thin, all legs, and miserable, but of course he could have pulled in any bar in any city in the world, even in his current outfit of (apparently) a ladies' yellow cardigan and a pair of jeans stolen from a very fat man. So Elton wondered all the more why Paul McCartney, one quarter of the biggest band the world had ever seen, had come to him. 

Well. One third now, he supposed. The thought stung like a papercut. 

"Where's your better half?" 

The words came out before he'd thought them through. A shadow passed over Paul's face, and the remarkable eyes shuttered. "Question for the theologians, that one, isn't it? Or is it philosophers? I've lost track. I'm nothin', these days. Religiously speaking." 

"You sort of  _ were  _ a religion, last time I looked," Elton said lightly. Then he added: "I meant Linda." 

"I know." Paul cast about for something to sit on, then threw himself down onto a sofa half-covered in unopened post. "I've pissed her off. Bad books for me." 

"I didn't know you two pissed each other off," Elton observed, pushing the post out of the way and gingerly sitting down himself. 

"Christ," Paul says, "we're a good team but we're not saints." One corner of his mouth lifted. "We're not  _ JohnandYoko,  _ who obviously never had a single fight  _ ever. _ " 

"Spoken to her, have you?" 

Paul sighed, his posture shifting. That was it, then. Why he was here. Elton remembered, vividly, the last time he'd seen John and Paul together, an unassailable little bubble of two in the corner of Elton's New York hotel room. Paul had been off his face then, too, but not like this. 

"I've spoken to her," Paul admitted, after a minute. "Now I've come to speak to you." 

"What about?" Elton said politely, pretending not to know. "I've got no plans for the evening. We could smoke something. Or there's always love and other indoor sports." 

Paul shot him a look that made Elton shrivel up a bit inside. 

"I'm -- I'm flirting with you," he said, apologetically. "But not really. I'd run a mile if you said yes." 

"I only said yes to John," Paul confessed, very soft. "That's the bitch of it, isn't it? I would've said yes to anything, if he'd ever asked." 

Jesus. Elton's eyes went to his liquor trolley, a ridiculous faddish thing he'd found in an antique showroom some rainy Saturday. It looked like a little globe half-embedded in a table, but when you popped the catch, the globe opened up to reveal gin, whisky, vodka -- whatever your poison. Paul was very obviously a whisky man, so Elton pulled the trolley towards him with his foot, popped the catch and gave Paul the bottle. 

"That was our drink," Paul said, taking it. "Whisky and coke, the Beatle bevy. Just whisky tonight, I think. Thanks." 

"Don't mention it," Elton said, taking a glass for himself and unscrewing the gin. He was altogether too sober for this conversation, not a state in which he often found himself. 

Paul took a swig right from the bottle, pulled a face. "I came to ask if you still had the pictures." He looked at Elton directly, his eyes suddenly clear. "I wanna see 'em." 

"Anyone else would've sold them to  _ The Sun,"  _ Elton said mildly, trying to cover his embarrassment at Paul just coming out with it like this. "Course I've still got them." 

"Who else can you trust, if not other tabloid fodder?" Paul smiled weakly. "If I'd thought you were gonna go to  _ The Sun,  _ I'd have pushed him off. Maybe." 

Elton remembered the scene: John whispering in Paul's ear; Paul laughing. The press of their mouths unexpected and shocking as a gunshot in the crowded room, even though everybody was high as a kite and nobody but Elton seemed to notice. "Maybe?" 

Paul lifted one shoulder, half a shrug. "He was asking, wasn't he? He hadn't asked me for anything, for years. I should've said no. I knew what you were like, you little voyeur." 

"But now you want to see the pictures," Elton parried. 

"I have to know," Paul said. His fingers tightened around the bottle, knuckles going white. "I need to know. I've asked everyone else I could think of; Christ. Might as well ask John's fuckin' face." 

Understanding dawned unhappily, and Elton suddenly felt a bit sick. He got up wordlessly and went to the bedroom, where the box of Polaroids sat on the top shelf of his wardrobe. A treasure trove for any journalist, this: if someone broke in and nicked it they'd be set for life. But then, nobody knew about the photographs, except the photographed. He'd kept it that way on purpose. 

They were, roughly, in chronological order. Elton revisited some of them more often than others; the corners of the Lennon-McCartney set were all dog-eared, a fact of which Elton was pinkly aware as he retrieved them. He hoped Paul would have more important things to look at than that. 

"Here." He went back into the front room and handed the little stack to Paul, face down. Ridiculous, to be worrying about his modesty at a time like this, but something told him Paul would be grateful for it. 

"Thanks." Paul took another pull from the bottle, then sighed, set it down on the trolley, and turned the stack over. 

Elton sat down again at the far side of the sofa, far enough away that he couldn't actually see what Paul was looking at, but, of course, he knew. John kissing him, first. John without his shirt, and then, later, without his glasses, which somehow made him look far more naked. Paul's mouth against John's throat and John's head thrown back, his mouth open, the look on his face something like ecstasy. Elton had never found the pill that could make him feel like that. 

Paul stopped on that one, the fourth one. Elton knew. The stack went on a bit -- some blurry, rather unflattering ones of them with their jeans pulled down below their arses, writhing. They'd dragged each other's clothes off as if it had been a fight. Elton remembered wondering who'd be on top, but then it had been impossible to tell. Like listening to those early close harmonies and trying to work out which voice was the lead.  _ If I fell in love with you…  _ But no, the fourth one was the money shot. 

"Oh," Paul said, his voice cracking, and Elton's heart cracked too at the sound of it. 

"What is it you want to know?" he asked, softly. 

"She said," Paul managed, "he still loved me. But she didn't know what I was asking. It's the same with everyone." 

" _ I  _ know what you're asking," Elton promised. "Christ. How can you doubt it?" 

Paul shrugged. He was still staring at the Polaroid, gripping it tightly, two-handed. "Doubt everything, don't I, these days. When something like that happens --" 

"Look at him." Elton gestured at the photograph. "The look on his face. He loved you to death. He was fuckin' obsessed with you. Got boring, actually." 

"Yeah?" Paul looked so hopeful at this, so pathetically hopeful, that it made Elton embarrassed for him, aching with it. "I kept thinking...we were gonna get back together. We talked about it. I was just waiting for him to ask me, and then." 

"Yeah." Elton reached out, a little awkwardly, and rubbed Paul's back. It was all a little awkward. They were friends, he supposed, but not the sort of friends who got drunk together on purpose, with nobody else around. Not like him and John. "It's shit, Paul. Everything about it's shit. I miss him all the time. But if I ever find a bloke who looks like  _ that  _ when I kiss him -- well. I'd be happy." He dared to look down at the photograph again. "Was he always like that in bed?" 

Paul's silence lingered a beat too long before he said lightly, "I wouldn't know, would I? Too late now." 

It was as if the words were meaningless. Individually, Elton understood what Paul was saying; he even understood it when he worked through the sentence in his head, and yet its intent was so baffling, so insane, that he almost couldn't grasp it. "Sorry?" 

"I wouldn't know," Paul repeated, slowly. "I was  _ in bed with  _ him more times than I've had hot dinners, but that? One-off for you, mate. Elton special." He looked at the photograph a moment longer, then tossed the pile down on the sofa. "So you'd better look after them." 

Elton's mouth felt as if it had been filled with chalk. His tongue stirred uselessly in it. "But he -- you --" 

"Yeah," Paul said. 

"He was in love with you," Elton stammered. "He was so fucking in love with you, it was  _ embarrassing.  _ He'd tell anyone, everyone. The minute you got a drink in him, or a pill. Paul this, Paul that, Paul's left me, I miss Paul. Paul's new record. Paul would've thought this was funny. My old estranged fiancé, Paul. He told  _ everyone."  _

Paul was quiet for a long time. Suddenly he didn't look drunk at all. "Except me. Even that night --" he gestured towards the stack of photographs, now demurely face down -- "he never said a word." 

"Maybe he didn't think you felt the same," Elton croaked, the words pathetically inadequate. 

"I've been in love with him since I was sixteen," Paul said. His voice had taken on that particular shuttered quality Elton recognised as characteristic; it was the way Paul got when he'd suddenly decided to pull up the drawbridge and retreat to wherever he lived inside himself, Paul-Land where nobody could reach him. John had bitched about that, too. It was just that the words he was saying were so fucking incongruous, Elton couldn't stand it. 

Uselessly, he said, "yeah?" 

"I wished I could  _ stop  _ loving him," said Paul. "Tried, didn't I? On multiple occasions. Now the bastard's dead and it still hasn't done the trick. I'm gonna love him for the rest of my fuckin' life." 

_ Sorry,  _ flitted across Elton's useless brain. Thank God, he didn't say it. He didn't say anything. 

Paul looked at the drinks trolley for a long minute. Elton wondered what he was thinking. 

"This is cool," Paul said, eventually, running his fingers across the surface of the globe. His voice had changed again, sliding seamlessly into something bland and inoffensive. Beatle Paul. "Where did you get it?" 

"Some antiques market," Elton said, "in Camden." He couldn't believe what he was being asked. 

"You'll have to take me there sometime," Paul said, and stood up with a groan. "Well. Thanks for the drink. I'll see myself out." 

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
